A thought experiment or Gedankenexperiment (from German) considers some hypothesis, theory, or principle for the purpose of thinking through its consequences. Given the structure of the experiment, it...

Ever since they invented quantum theory in the early 1900s, explains Maroney, who is himself a physicist at the University of Oxford, UK, they have been talking about how strange it is — how it allows...

With its ideas of particles zipping in and out of existence, quantum mechanics is probably the kookiest-sounding theory in science. And our understanding of it is little helped by the mysterious “pro...

Quantum mechanics is now being used to construct a new generation of computers that can solve the most complex scientific problems—and unlock every digital vault in the world. These will perform in s...

Researchers have successfully produced pairs of spin-entangled electrons and demonstrated that they remain entangled even when they are separated from one another on a chip. This research could contri...

The universe really is weird, which is bad news both for Albert Einstein and for would-be hackers hoping to break into quantum encryption systems.
Eighty years after the physicist dismissed as “spooky...

A team of researchers led by UCLA electrical engineers has demonstrated a new way to harness light particles, or photons, that are connected to each other and act in unison no matter how far apart the...

Brian Swingle was a graduate student studying the physics of matter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he decided to take a few classes in string theory to round out his education — “be...

Particles don’t obey the same rules as people. Poke a particle, and another one far away can instantly respond the touch -- without any messages passing through the space between, as if the two partic...

Researchers at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, the University of Vienna, and the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona have achieved a new milestone in quantum physics: they were ...

Elon Musk, the well-known entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX, believes there's a "one-in-billions" chance humanity is not living in a computer simulation. Speaking at tech publication Recode's annu...

In the history of science, Laplace's demon was the first published articulation of causal or scientific determinism by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814. According to determinism, if someone (the Demon) kn...

Ever since they invented quantum theory in the early 1900s, explains Maroney, who is himself a physicist at the University of Oxford, UK, they have been talking about how strange it is — how it allows...

Kavka's toxin puzzle is a thought experiment about the possibility of forming an intention to perform an act which, following from reason, is an action one would not actually perform. It was presented...

IBZL - infinite bandwidth zero latency - is a thought experiment that asks: what will happen when bandwidth (for connecting to the Internet for example) is so great, and latency so small, that it no l...

The Cosmic catastrophe is a thought experiment in which the sun were to instantaneously disappear. The question is what would then happen to the earth and the other planets orbiting the sun. According...

In the philosophy of thermal and statistical physics, Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment created by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell to "show that the Second Law of Thermodynamics has only a sta...

The infinite monkey theorem and its associated imagery is considered a popular and proverbial illustration of the mathematics of probability, widely known to the general public because of its transmis...

The Gettier problem is a philosophical question about whether a piece of information that happens to be true but that someone believes for invalid reasons, such as a faulty premise, counts as knowled...

In a thought experiment proposed by the Italian probabilist Bruno de Finetti in order to justify Bayesian probability, an array of wagers is coherent precisely if it does not expose the wagerer to cer...

The universe seems incredibly complex. But could its rules be dead simple? Juergen Schmidhuber's fascinating story will convince you that this universe and your own life are just by-products of a very...